Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin
20/40 Publishing Prize
Winning Book 2024 – Fiction
By PS Cottier and NG Hartland
Finlay Lloyd Publishing
ISBN: 9780645927016, paperback, $24,
The Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize is an annual publishing award for fiction and nonfiction manuscripts of between 20,000 and 40,000 words. Each year, two books are chosen through a blind evaluation process by a panel of judges and for 2024, The Thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin was the fiction winner. The book is a lovely, small format with dust jacket – very easy to hold, to carry around, and to read. The stories revolve around sixteen Vladimir Putin lookalikes. Each lookalike has his own story about how he was found, recruited and put on a retainer by mysterious men who are paying for a potential stand-in for Putin should he visit their city. It seems like a pretty good gig. None of the lookalikes actually have to do anything as Putin never visits, and the money continues regardless of what they do – some become comedians, trading on their genetics, and some opt for obscurity. Each story works as a standalone piece, short, engaging, and set in a different part of the world from London to Valparaiso, Belgrade to Montreal. Three of the fake Putins are Russians. Each lookalike has his own particular story which is partly informed by location and partly by circumstance. The pieces appear quite distinct but they begin to overlap as the book progresses, forming a coherent whole that twists back on itself in uncomfortable ways. The end result is an overarcing pattern that creates a bigger story, linked not just by the missing character of Putin but also by the way the characters, their settings, and the story’s time progression intersect.
The book begins and ends with Dave McDermott, an Australian surfer in the ocean. His opening lines become a metaphor for what happens in the book, alerting the reader to think about the nature of repetition, similarity, and the relationships between superficial perceptions and deeper patterns and rhythms in life:
My focus is only on the rhythm and shape of the swell. Waves may look similar–the brow of one like the flipping fringe of another at a hurried or passing glance–but they never quite repeat. (9)
McDermott’s two stories connect, and together with the two stories of Samuel Chatswood, a Londoner, create bookends that bring the book together into a cohesive whole. The stories take on a Beckett-like absurdity that is often droll, referencing and poking fun at modern politics with its ridiculous machinations, pivoting around the real life example of Putin and the many rumours surrounding him. Coupled with the humour is a sinister overtone that permeates the work:
After the intensity of my recruitment, some explanation at the least would have been expected. But none has been provided. Yes, what rankles after all these years is not so much the fact that I have been passed over, but the fact that no reason has ever been given. A mutual relationship can be altered in thought, words or dead, and in sins of omission as much as in those of commission. (29)
What does the Russian government really want with these lookalikes? Is the Russian government even responsible for creating this secret network? How does being recruited change the lives of these people, are they innocent victims, onto a good lark, or just pawns in a bigger, more unsavoury plan? Where does culpability lie? How does anyone know what is real and what is false? These are all questions that are raised in The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin and the answers, or lack of answers engages the reader in thinking more broadly about notions of truth, agency and reality, and how these seemingly absurd situations relate to the lives we are all living.
It matters not, I conclude, what is reality and what is an extravagant theory from a feverish mind. (90)
Cottier and Hartland’s writing is perfectly meshed. There’s no sense that these are different writers at work here, and collectively the stories mesh together in engaging ways that hold a mirror to the way in which modern politics plays with reality and power.The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin is a fast easy read, but this quirky and strangely haunting book covers a lot of ground and will leave readers thinking for a long time about the relationships between the ways in which we are all manipulated by power structures against how we create meaning and value in our lives.